Yeah, yeah, yeah… America is different things to different people. But there are still core beliefs and values that almost all of us share. These are things like forthrightness, and appreciation of abundance, and confidence in the future. In sum, we like things bold, big, and bodacious.
So here C/D presents, as American stares down its 238th birthday, the 17 most ’Murican of American cars and trucks. Not just production vehicles, but the machines that express the essence of American character and ambition.
You know, whatever, here’s a list.
1. Bigfoot
Sometimes the aesthetic of things gets out ahead of any function. Back in 1975, Bob Chandler was running his Midwest Four Wheel Drive and Performance Center in Missouri and using his 1974 Ford F-250 4×4 pickup to run errands for the business and as his family hauler. If that blue F-250 looked good with big tires under it, then it was going to look even better with bigger tires. Then why not even bigger tires? And pretty soon the tires were so large that the truck had morphed from being a pickup into a monster.
By 1979 Chandler was being paid to exhibit his monster truck, now christened Bigfoot 4x4x4, at events around the Midwest. By 1981 it showed up in a film called Take This Job and Shove It. And somewhere in there it was decided that a monster truck could drive right over the tops of regular cars.
America has loved monster trucks ever since.
2. 1992 Hummer H1
The M998 “Humvee” military truck is sort of an oversize Jeep replacement developed in the early 1980s. It was never intended to run on civilian roads or be a regular commuter vehicle. Then, in the early 1990s, an Austrian bodybuilder turned movie star named Arnold Schwarzenegger decided he wanted to drive one every day through the streets of Santa Monica, California, and the beast went on to earn some battle credentials in Desert Storm.
Ridiculously wide and clumsy in daily use, the Hummer H1 nonetheless became something of an icon of that bygone era when it seemed like the real-estate bubble would never burst, Lehman Brothers was a stable employer, and it was sensible for Californians to elect Schwarzenegger governor.
Hummer stopped production of the H1 in 2006, and Hummer itself died in 2010. But for that moment, there was nothing more American.
3. 2013 Ford Shelby GT500
Take a simple American car – the only one left in production with a solid rear axle – and shove 662 horsepower into it from a 5.8-liter, DOHC 32-valve V-8 force-fed by a Roots blower. The result is a Mustang that would rocket through the quarter-mile in 11.8 seconds and top out at more than 200 mph. Insane? Obviously. Glorious? Like landing on the moon.
Only America could build such a car. And only America has been to the moon.
4. 1967 Chevrolet Corvette 427 L88
It’s the best-looking mid-year Corvette in its final year, powered by a massive lump of an iron-block V-8 topped by aluminum heads and huge carburetors, under-rated at 435 horsepower. “The L88 is rated at 435 hp, like the L89, but we were almost afraid to try it,” we wrote in the May 1967 issue. “Just listening to it idle, we knew it must have over 500 real horsepower, and besides, it was Friday the 13th.”
There have been faster production Corvettes than the race-ready L88, but this is the Corvette every other Corvette wants to be. Only 20 were built. And in September 2013, one sold for $3.2 million at a Mecum auction in Dallas.
5. 1959 Cadillac Eldorado
It’s the ultimate in over-the-top flamboyant styling: a 225-inch-long parade float with a toothy grille up front and the tallest tail fins ever put on a Cadillac in back. Plenty of other countries could have made it. But only America could have conceived it.
6. 1971 Cadillac Eldorado
Excessively overstyled with every 1970s cliché, the front-drive second-generation Eldorado was as tasteless as its ’59 Eldorado grandfather. It was styling as entertainment. The 500-cubic-inch (8.2-liter) V-8 powering the ’71 was rated at 365 horsepower. But by 1975 the output had been strangled down to 190 horsepower.
7. 1932 Ford V-8 Roadster
As the first, popularly priced V-8–powered American car, it’s a classic on that basis alone. But it was as a used car that it became the standard platform for hot rods in the years after World War II. There’s nothing more American than a hot rod, and this is the car that spawned more of them.
8. 1931 Duesenberg Model J Murphy Whitell Coupe
Between 1921 and 1937, Duesenberg was the ultimate American car. Not just bold, but arrogant. Not just large, but enormous. No just well-built, but built with unrivaled quality. And the dooziest of Duesenbergs was this Murphy-bodied Model J coupe. In 2011 it sold at the Gooding & Company auction for $10.34 million; that remains a record for an American car.
9. 1923 Miller 122
Harry Miller was the single greatest American racing innovator of the early twentieth century. And his greatest achievement was combining his brilliant 2.0-liter racing four-cylinder with his model 122 single-seat racer. It was a combination that won the 1923 Indianapolis 500 with driver Tommy Milton.
Between 1922 and 1938, Miller-powered cars would win the 500 a full 12 times. Then the Miller engine, under the guidance of his onetime employee Fred Offenhauser, would evolve into the “Offy” four that would win Indy another 27 times. In the 1976 classic, Johnny Rutherford was the last winner at Indy in an Offy-powered car.
10. 1948 Tucker 48
Preston Tucker—through sheer will and some shaky financing—came agonizingly close to revolutionizing the automotive world with this rear-engined machine wearing three headlights.
Only 51 Tucker 48s were completed. But the Preston Tucker story remains one of the greatest in American automotive history.
11. 1990 Vector W8
Gerald Wiegert’s lunatic take on the supercar is this mid-engined monster built using aircraft-grade parts and a 650-horsepower, twin-turbocharged, 5.7-liter version of the Chevrolet small-block V-8. Using a three-speed automatic transmission, the top speed was a theoretical 220 mph. But it went a lot faster than that in every American adolescent’s dreams.
12. Don Garlits’s 1956 Swamp Rat I
Big Daddy’s first Swamp Rat dragster wasn’t much more than a pair of frame rails and an enormous Chrysler Hemi V-8 engine. But it was fast, and in 1958 it went 180 mph in the quarter-mile. It’s the car upon which Garlits’s career was built—and all of modern drag-racing is built upon Garlits’s career.
Swamp Rat I would be followed by 33 more Swamp Rats through the years. But go to Garlits’s Museum of Drag Racing in Ocala, Florida, and it’s this car that has the most honored place.
13. 2015 Cadillac Escalade
Back in 1999 the first Escalade wasn’t much more than a GMC Yukon Denali with a fresh grille. And the Yukon Denali wasn’t much more than a Chevy Tahoe carrying every bolt-on part GM had in its inventory. And the Chevy Tahoe wasn’t much more than a Chevy pickup with a really bitchin’ shell.
Today, the fourth generation of this sort of ridiculous, but really kind of awesome, truck is now finding its way into Cadillac dealerships. Its styling is brilliantly excessive, and it’s more truly luxurious than ever before, but underneath there’s still a lot of Chevy pickup aboard. There isn’t another country on Earth that would dare produce anything like it.
14. 1967 Plymouth GTX “Silver Bullet” Street Racer
The greatest car in the history of street racing, it was nominally a Plymouth GTX owned by a mechanic who worked at a Sunoco station on Woodward Avenue in Birmingham, Michigan. But in reality it was a test bed for every go-fast idea that a group of performance-crazed Chrysler engineers could dream up and scheme to build.
Under the hood is a version of the classic race Hemi V-8 swollen to 487 cubic inches—that’s 8.0 liters if you speak not-American. Power output? Make a good guess. But keep in mind that, in full street trim with mufflers and a three-speed TorqueFlite automatic, it was capable of running 10.5 in the quarter-mile at 132 mph.
And it only rarely made it onto a racetrack.
15. 1955 Chevrolet
It’s the first car to carry Chevrolet’s legendary small-block V-8. But while that 265-cubic-incher was rated by the factory at only 162 horsepower, the factory “Power Pack” led to the small-block becoming the most popular racing and high-performance street engine in American history.
Today 180 horsepower seems modest. But back then it was enough to propel Fonty Flock to a win at the 100-mile Grand National race on Columbia Speedway’s half-mile dirt oval in March 1955. That was Chevrolet’s first NASCAR win.
16. 2013 Tesla Model S
Preston Tucker almost did it. Gerald Wiegert took a good stab at it. But it’s Elon Musk who has successfully established a truly revolutionary, wholly new car brand in America with Tesla.
There’s room to criticize Tesla as being unfairly subsidized by the government. But be that as it may, the bottom line is that it’s producing an amazing car against agonizing odds. And every all-electric Model S is built in an assembly plant in Fremont, California, which is, at least right now, in the United States.
Tesla is the great American automotive-success story of the twenty-first century. And there are plenty of reasons to celebrate that.
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17. 2009 Cadillac Presidential Limousine
A huge, ungainly, but oddly rugged and brutally handsome thing, the Presidential Limousine that has served Barack Obama has become an instantly iconic element of his presidency.
Most of its specifications and tech details are classified, but this presidential transportation device is pretty obviously based on GMC’s TopKick commercial truck chassis with parts and pieces from various Cadillacs—those are Escalade headlights—giving it some passing resemblance to civilian-owned luxury cars.
Nicknamed “The Beast” by the Secret Service, it embodies all the contradictions that make America and Americans unique and great. It’s a truck disguised as a limousine; a royal ride for the leader of a democratic republic; and it’s a heavily armed and armored security chamber symbolizing a country that prides itself on being open and free. So it’s perfect.
America, f*** yeah!
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